Say hello to Calvin Martin Thomas! My wife and I welcomed our second baby boy into the world on Thursday, February 6 at 10:40 in the morning. He weighed 9 pounds, 4 ounces at birth and was 19 3/4 inches long. Isn’t he cute?

If you’ve been an NF subscriber for a little while, you might remember the impending birth announcement I placed on the final page of our Issue #6 – I wrote about how multiplayer gaming was fun, but that I was really looking forward to the day when my own little family would grow to the point where we had a full count of four players living under the same roof. Well alongside myself, my wife Mary and our first boy Carter, Calvin has arrived to fulfill that wish. He’s Player 4!

(Though we’ll let him get a little older before handing him his first game controller. :p)

My apologies to anyone out there who has emailed me in the last several days, or left messages for the Kickstarter campaign or is waiting for anything else that requires me to take action for you. I’ve been a little busy! I’ll be getting caught up on everything over the course of the next few days, so thanks for your patience and understanding.

But what would a birth announcement be without some celebration? We do have that Kickstarter going on, after all, so let’s attend to it a bit right now. So far, two weeks into the campaign, the most popular pledge tier has been The Early Bird Print Subscription. And understandably so – it lets you sign up to get all of our upcoming Year 2 issues for five bucks cheaper than last year’s print subscription cost. I set that tier to a total of 500 backers before the campaign launched, and as of this writing all of those 500 spots have been spoken for.

So let’s open up 500 more, shall we? To celebrate Calvin’s arrival, I’m adding another Print Subscription pledge tier at the $25 commitment level, so more of you out there who are interesting in the physical magazines can save a bit of cash versus what the print subscription price normally is (that’s $30). Even better, if we do get 500 new sign-ups at $25 apiece, that’ll be a total of $12,500 – which would put us over the top of our funding goal!

So let your friends know! Thanks for all the support you’ve all shown through social media and word-of-mouth to raise awareness of NF Magazine and our Kickstarter in particular. The quick rise to over $36,000 for our campaign has been encouraging and reassuring for this dad’s heart, and put my mind at ease so that I could fully focus on the birth of my new baby boy just a few days ago. Now that he’s here, let’s run this thing all the way to the finish line!